./emilychang eBot

A few new habits can make the difference between staying on task, finding what you need and getting things done - or having a tech meltdown.

Entering your Web site in the Webby Awards is a little like buying a box of Cracker Jack - everybody wins a prize.

"Imagine someone created an award ceremony for every possible use of paper, with awards for the best supermarket tabloid, the most disingenuous autobiography by a former government official, the most comprehensive bibliography and the best folding for a paper airplane.

That’s what the Webby Awards are like, just substitute the Internet for paper. In a cavernous former bank branch on Wall Street, more than 100 winners in the 12th annual Webby awards trotted to the stage. They were honored in such categories as best home/welcome page, best insurance site and the ever-competitive best self-promotion/portfolio.”

Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?

Flattered to be included in this brief timeline of the history of blogging.

One of the great things about WordPress is how easily you can have it up and running, completely customized to your liking, in such a short period of time. After setting up WordPress for several of my friends, I found that having a ‘checklist’ makes things go even faster - so I decided to write it all up and share with you. 

The basic concept behind Draw a Secret (DAS) is that humans excel at image recognition and memory, so “passwords” should be designed to leverage that ability.

Designers decide and design the flow, the copy, the structure of the page, the programmers make all of it come to life by plugging it into the backend. All along both parties trade concessions on how to get the feature done as fast possible by grabbing the easiest value.

So stop thinking about designers as artists who work in a different universe of neat graphics and start thinking of them as someone who decides what goes where, which form elements to use, how to split features between screens, what words to use, and how everything fits together in a coherent experience.

Infuse your mind with cool. Emily Chang’s PicoCool blog finds “tiny and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures.” Browse the blog or subscribe to the RSS feed for products, photos, and other creations that will shake up your thinking. For example, check out the bathtub-shaped SPA memo pad holder with a little bather relaxing Calgon-style. Just looking at his (her?) bulbous head makes me feel more relaxed and open to good ideas.

I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.